Grid-Aware Real-Time Control and Balancing Between Microgrids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time control method for microgrids that implements day-ahead plans, ensuring feasibility, grid constraint compliance, and proper power distribution, demonstrated through a case study.

Contribution

It presents a novel three-step real-time balancing approach for microgrids that bridges the gap between day-ahead planning and real-time execution.

Findings

The approach ensures device feasibility in real-time.

It maintains grid constraints using DC power flow.

The method performs comparably to optimal offline algorithms.

Abstract

Due to the energy transition, lots of research has been conducted within the last decade on the topics of energy management systems or local energy trading approaches, often on the day-ahead or intraday level. A large majority of these approaches focuses on 15 or 60-minute time intervals for their operation, however, the question of how the planned solutions are realized within these time intervals is often left unanswered. Within this work, we aim to close this gap and propose a real-time balancing and control approach for a set of microgrids, which implements the day-ahead solutions. The approach is based on a three-step framework, in which the first step consists of ensuring the feasibility of devices within the microgrids. The second step focuses on the grid constraints of the connecting medium voltage grid using the DC power flow formulation due to the running time requirements of a real-time approach. The last step is to propagate the solution into the individual microgrids, where the allocated power needs to be distributed among the devices and households. Within a case study, we show that the proposed real-time control approach works as intended and is comparable to an optimal offline algorithm under some mild assumptions.